Lufthansa Group enhances retailing through direct offer distribution to metasearch using continuous pricing

Challenge

The Lufthansa Group (LHG), Europe’s biggest group of airline brands, was looking for more control and freedom to retail to their growing network of metasearchers (MSEs). MSEs are really important to the airline group for reach, especially in the markets where the airline brand is not very well-known.

The landscape for metasearch was cumbersome and fragmented—even within the group’s carriers:

• The airline group suffered high transaction costs for offer distribution.
• Due to the various shopping sources MSEs were using, there were huge availability discrepancies and offer inconsistencies.
• There was no offer control and customers had a disparate shopping experience across the diversity of MSE outlets.
• The lack of offer control resulted in no opportunity to innovate across this extended channel of distribution.

Solution

The Lufthansa Group and PROS fostered very close collaboration and partnership to deploy a single offer instance for the entire metasearch network. The LHG adopted a fully airline-controlled setup to fuel offer creation to the MSE channel.

• In a few months, a single shopping solution via PROS Offer Creation was deployed to metasearch partners for all LHG hub carriers.
• All MSE partners were accessing the same availability as the offers shown on the airlines’ dotcom channels—ensuring offer control and consistency across channels.
• The LHG used the pandemic to prepare their retailing capabilities by enabling continuous pricing through PROS for their entire MSE partner network, driving incremental revenue gains.
• 3 years into the project, the LHG increased the scope of the project to accommodate the growth of the MSE channel.

Results

With PROS, the Lufthansa Group today is in full control of their offer creation for their MSE channel. The LHG carriers benefit from a single, streamlined solution to distribute consistent dynamic offers directly to metasearch partners, achieving:

• Very high offer accuracy and increased conversion rate across all metasearch partners.
• Optimized cost of sale and distribution.
• The ability to evaluate better ROI from their MSEs based on look-to-revenue as a metric, instead of look-to-book.
• The freedom to progress on their vision for modern airline retailing by including new partners and new partner frameworks for offer and order, and further offer portfolio enhancements – flexibility, servicing, ancillaries, upsells and more.